


tell me we're dead (and i'll love you even more)

by squeakymonster



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: BDSM, Bloodplay, Cock & Ball Torture, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Needles, Painplay, Vampires, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 11:23:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squeakymonster/pseuds/squeakymonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt springs forward and bites Hermann. He skips his Hermann’s throat entirely; he is not being romantic. Instead, he nearly bites off Hermann’s ear, and then, stepping back, blood dripping from his grinning mouth, he gestures at the ruination of bodies around them and says, “Take what you want.”<br/>And Hermann hisses, “Abomination,” and kisses him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me we're dead (and i'll love you even more)

They meet for the first time in the mid-seventeenth century, both of them fucking anachronisms already, and it’s not until five hundred years later that they know they’re meant for the future.

It’s a church. There is death in the air, and there are two men standing there, but only one living man is left in God’s house. Hermann should be afraid, but he is not. He’s too old and too much a soldier to be a priest, and too much a cripple to be a soldier. He should have a place in life, but he does not. He’s angry, instead. And Newt is smiling.

It's ridiculous, but. Instead of running for his life or screaming, Hermann Gottlieb takes one look at Newt and curses the dead man in the church with all he has. Hermann summons low dirty soldier’s curses from the Thirty Years War, bites his father’s disappointment into every word, breaks his vows to silence, breaks his vows to kindness, breaks his vows to purity, in one clean cold breath.

Newt just calls up every foul and filthy word from a hundred and fifty years of travel, down the Silk Road and back again, doesn’t pause until Hermann hits him with the full German force of the Bible, every curse like an angry God, like the angel of death they both are (or will be). Newt is silent for a moment, after that. Neither of them move.

And then Newt springs forward and bites Hermann. He skips his Hermann’s throat entirely; he is not being romantic. Instead, he nearly bites off Hermann’s ear, and then, stepping back, blood dripping from his grinning mouth, he gestures at the ruination of bodies around them and says, “Take what you want.”

And Hermann hisses, “Abomination,” and kisses him.

+

Newt likes sewers better than high society, Hermann discovers. He can play at being a noble for about five minutes before he says something wildly inappropriate and/or eats somebody’s face. He is very purposefully blood-stained and filthy.

Hermann plays along when Newt is high society, fashions himself a cane of human bone to call ivory and grows his hair long so Newt can pull it up away from his face and tell him he looks dashing. (Newt does not actually say “dashing”. Newt says, “Nice hair, shitface,” but it means the same thing.) And then they go on the run again and Hermann cuts his hair so it’s just barely long enough that Newt can bury his hands in it when he comes.

Hermann knows in his bones that Newt was a monster long before his heart stopped beating. Newt has perhaps been a monster since he was born, singing broken-down songs from midnight rooftops and the depths of woods where children are told never to go, and yes, the sewers. Newt likes filth, walks catacombs and underground passages half-naked with a feral-cat glint in his eye. The only other time Hermann has ever seen Newt look like that is when his lips close around the head of Newt’s cock.

+

They are found in the late eighteenth century, pretending to be lords and then playing revolutionaries. A vampire hunter finds them, a breed of mankind Hermann did not know existed until that moment, a breed of mankind Hermann maybe used to be, or would have been.

(Now he’s not a breed of mankind at all.)

He holds them in an old barn in southern France for four weeks. Hermann is nearing his 150th birthday and those weeks seem longer than the thirty five years he was alive.

The sun hits them in the afternoons through sheer curtains, low enough in intensity that they do not turn to ash. Their skin bubbles up with it. It’s worse for Newt, who has not seen the sun in four centuries. He screams for days. Hermann imagines it’s as much from the beauty he had forgotten as it is from the pain, but he does not ask.

They never know the name of the man who held them captive for a month. They know instead the tread of his boot against the straw-spattered floorboards, the weight of his whip against their back, his bright flash of his knife in their arms and their necks and their eyes, the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles, the taste of his come in their mouths.

Hermann wants to strip the flesh from the man’s back, wants to hurt him in every way he knows how to. His bloodlust is roaring. He holds it within himself, plans a way out and does not try to fight the man while he is weak, but the urge nearly overpowers him every single time he sees Newt on his knees.

He settles for setting the barn on fire with the man inside.

His good leg is broken when they take their leave of the man. Newt’s eyes are wild; something inside him is still screaming (Hermann doesn’t know that it will ever stop screaming). Hermann kisses him and Newt claws at him, helpless and feral and maybe more dangerous than Hermann’s ever seen him.

Newt bends for a moment then, pliant, still. Hermann lets the words _darling boy_ slip from his mouth, just this once in their whole long acquaintance, his legs shaking, neither of them really strong enough to stand on. Hermann lets himself lean on Newt for that moment, tumbling vulnerable and sweet toward him.

And then Newt stabs him with a poker, steals the only horse they have, and runs.

+

In a funny reversal of roles, Newt spends most of the first half of the nineteenth century on a ship and Hermann spends it in the sewers. Newt tattoos his body with sea monsters and marine plants, acquires an American twang that sits uneasily with his native German. Hermann tattoos his body with regret, feeds off rats and spends his time in sewers, wading through knee-deep piss-filled water and spending more time thinking of Newt than he wants to admit (which is any time at all).

In Vienna, in 1858, Newt tells Hermann he was a pirate, tells stories of the moon over the sea and saucy seafaring wenches. He scrawls delicate flowers and lines of Whitman and Wilde and Byron on Hermann’s back with a needle, licking up the black-stained drops of blood that form wherever he makes a mistake. He tattoos Hermann’s thighs and hipbones with his name, with the Lord’s Prayer, with every scrap of Shakespeare he can remember, just so he can have an excuse to bite at the head of Hermann’s cock with sharp teeth whenever Hermann winces.  
He backhands Hermann’s dick across his belly to get it out of the way of the curling vines he etches across the innermost part of his upper thighs. Hermann groans, low in his belly, and he has never been harder in his (after)life.

Newt puts to an end sixty odd years of abstinence on Hermann’s part, and the taste of fresh human blood in his mouth makes him feel slightly sick. He halts, for a moment, in the potpourried parlour of a home much too grand for them, feels her blood dripping down his face, and for a second, he feels guilty, remembers that he is a monster.

But then he fucks Newt’s mouth until he’s gagging with it, tears running down his face and cutting clean paths through the blood smeared there, and oh—

Being a monster feels so good.

+

Hermann runs away from Newt like a disobedient child from a parent (he doesn’t like to think of it that way). He runs and shivers and sweats and is good for a decade as if that could scrub the blood from his hands his throat his mouth (he doesn’t think he’ll ever get the taste out of his mouth, if he’s being honest with himself). He drinks hot strong tea, to keep the night terrors away, and reads mathematics journals, when they come, and he needs comforting.

And then Newt smiles and becks a finger, and Hermann remembers that sanity is boring.

+

They have fucked for centuries. They know all the places that break each other, make each other swear and gasp and sweat and come. They are so old that it should feel routine when they meet in Russia, 1917, as-yet unnamed Molotov cocktails lighting up the streets. It doesn’t.

Hermann is shaking, shivering with the want of it, and Newt, Newt is shaking with the fill of it. And Hermann should skulk away, should feed on rats and forget his shame and remember only guilt, Hermann should look away, look down, look anywhere but straight at Newt sauntering blood-stained and grinning down the street, should do anything but hiss, “Filth.”  
There it is. Newt hears it, quiet as it is, and he’s turning around yelling, “Hello, asshole,” in that rusty-tin-can voice of his (Hermann has not adapted well to most changes, but he has tin cans down cold), before Hermann can run, can melt away into the shadows. “Did ya miss me? You’ve been away way too long, baby boy.”

And Hermann would say no, but his breath smells of rats, so he just snarls something wordless and runs. Electricity fills his veins which stopped pumping blood centuries ago.  
(Newt catches him in the end. He always does. And then: well, there are greater terrors for czars than revolutionaries.)

+

It is four thirty in the morning. Hermann is coming home from work to the rooms he keeps in a low-rent apartment building in the Tenderloin. He is a night janitor at a hospital. They give him easy access to blood, and dental coverage. It’s not bad.

It’s winter, 1999, in San Francisco. He last killed someone twelve years ago. He last saw Newt twelve or fifteen or twenty years ago. He doesn’t try to remember. His cane is made of metal and plastic, not bone. He has almost forgotten real temptation.

And then Newt comes clawing at his door like a bad dream, leaving long gouges in the wood and hissing wordlessly. His face is bruised and dirty and he is thinner than Hermann has ever seen him. Hermann pulls him inside, bleary eyed and in pajamas, but only because Newt is making a scene, gasping and moaning and shaking, barely able to hold himself up.

Inside, he falls over halfway to the couch, so Hermann drags him over and props him up on the coffee table. Newt is half-conscious, at best. Hermann is halfway to the kitchen when he slurs, “I, I want out, okay, I wanna get out of this. I want. I want you.” And then he’s unconscious, and he conks his head on the edge of the coffee table on the way down, leaving him with a nasty little cut.

Hermann sighs. He estimates that Newt has probably been without blood for maybe a day. It’s only going to get worse from here on out. “Inconsiderate little prick,” he mutters. “Other people have afterlives going on, business to attend to.” And then he goes to grab the first aid kit and the chains.

+

Hermann watches the new millennium being rung in through the gaps in closed blinds. The apartment is soundproofed and the outside walls are thick, so he cannot hear the revelry, but he can see the people milling through the streets, drunk and happy.

Behind him, Newt swears again, coming awake out of a shivering feverish sleep. “…You cocksucking motherfucker foul son of a whore, pig feces, saukerl, arschloch, fucking shit-for-brains cunt,” and then it’s all Old High Germanic, the fourteenth century ringing clear on his tongue. It makes Hermann smile. He answers in kind, his German newer, Copernicus and Agrippa but baser, unpublishable words, the language of pig farmers and soldiers and never, never priests.

This is the first time Newt has been in withdrawal. Hermann enjoys it, a little bit. He smiles, almost fond, and grabs a fistful of Newt’s hair. Pulling his head back a little too hard to make him gasp, he drawls, “Abomination,” and kisses him, like that will keep the monsters away.

**Author's Note:**

> I just--I want to put it out there that in my head this is absolutely not an AU, this is just. A pre-canon fic spanning a few hundred years.


End file.
